


Time Held Me Green And Dying

by Cunien



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reverse Chronology, Savoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 17:37:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1907853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cunien/pseuds/Cunien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>But the blood, the blood, the blood - there’s none left in him, in anyone any more. It was all shed in that clearing, on that night, pints and gallons of it until the snow was red and curdled. There’s nothing left to give.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>A tragedy, in reverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Held Me Green And Dying

**Author's Note:**

>   
> _Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,_  
>  _Time held me green and dying_  
>  _Though I sang in my chains like the sea._  
>  \- Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas

** Ten  **

There’s a girl of nineteen or twenty who lives off the Rue de Glatigny, in a little attic where the floorboards creak and scrape and the bed knocks the crumbling plaster from the damp wall. He isn’t certain if she’s a prostitute, but he pays her, anyway. She has a scar that runs the length of her face, from her right temple to curve at the quirk of her mouth, thin and white and delicate as embroidery on a lady’s handkerchief. It makes him think of Porthos, spawns a burr of heat deep in his belly, the only point of warmth in limbs that are packed tight with icy cold these day. He likes to run his calloused finger along the ridged line, to see it pucker as she pouts. He knows she doesn’t like it, but he cannot quite help himself.

There’s something beautiful in her ruined face that makes his heart cramp and hurt. He’s never asked her how she came by the scar, from what must have been a terrible wound. He doesn’t really want to know.

He envies her, though. His greatest scars are hidden.

He doesn’t like the way she watches him as he kneels on the hard floorboards of her attic room and closes his eyes in prayer. Her gaze is like a prickle on his skin, reminds him too much of uneasy jittering, of fingernails scratching red lines across his arms, the memory of the pain something disconnected and frozen away.

*

** Nine **

On a wind-whipped day in the last week of April, Porthos, Athos and a handful of other recruits are quietly given their commissions, ushered into the depleted ranks of the King’s Musketeers with little pomp or ceremony. Aramis still can’t help but feel, with a curious sort of detachment, that most of them won’t survive that long. Of course, Athos and Porthos have more than proven their worth, and since they’d both been assigned to Aramis after first arriving as new recruits at the garrison he is more than confident of their capability.

But, he thinks, what does that matter, since twenty raw but good, commissioned Musketeers died in one night, a blood-red night where it didn’t matter how capable you were, how well-deserved your blue cloak and pauldron. Day follows day, and still there seems little reason that Aramis can see for the deaths of so many, for the survival of one, for the disappearance of another. The question lies like a sliver of ice at the bottom of his heart, cutting a little deeper with each breath.

*

** Eight **

It’s been three weeks, but he doesn’t dream of it, doesn’t think of it, though it sits like a heavy cloud at the edge of his mind through day and night until the smell of snow in the air is a constant presence. It’s a threat and it’s a promise, and he knows somewhere deep and vital that it will break over his head at some point, but all he can do is push and heave at it, and pray that it stays one day away.

He doesn’t dream of Marsac either, but like the snow-heavy clouds his presence is never far away, brushing at the edges of Aramis’ mind in a way that’s so certain he begins to look over his shoulder and scan the faces in every crowd, in the huddle of soldiers in the garrison courtyard or the press of men at a gaming table. He knows, of course, that Marsac is many miles away, has perhaps crossed borders, shedding his name and his old life in a way that, sometimes, in the treacherous and sleep-barren hours of the night, Aramis envies.

Aramis has fought his whole life against his own nature, it’s easier now just to believe that there are two distinct people in him: the man who loves God, and the man who loves the scent of a woman on his own skin, the one who yearns for peace, and the one who glories in killing, the man who stitches and the man who cuts.

In his better moments he understands that every man is a shattered reflection of God, and it is never so clear as good or evil, but Aramis’s better moments are scarce these days.

Yet despite it all, he’s been able to reconcile his faith with his less than faithful life: Aramis believes, with a steadfastness that’s deep and quiet and everything that he can never be.

He stills believes, but he cannot understand anymore. 

So he prays. And he fucks. And laughs and fights and drinks but always, _always_ prays, and he does it all with an intensity that frightens him, when he allows himself to stop and think. When Aramis looks up for a moment from the endless forward motion his life is becoming he can see the tightness about Porthos’ eyes, the way Athos will look at him for just a beat too long sometimes, the way Treville won’t look at him at all.

His faith isn’t a surprise to any of them anymore, they hear him praying after battle and over the wounds he sews, each stitch a benediction. He’d told Porthos that he went into the seminary when he was young, and in his more drunken sombre moments, that he found the same comfort in the rules and routines and restrictions of the church as he does now in those of a soldier.

Aramis has always been a spinning of love and sadness and quicksilver anger, a free-wheeling formlessness that needed something to push against to become a thing of structure. In the seminary he finally found a shape that he could be, but the church had not wanted him for long, and he began to split at the seams and spill back out into nothingness. A heart too full of violence, the old abbé had told him, a head too full of questions and a body that craved satisfaction.

And, when he was sixteen, a girl fallen pregnant whom he loved with all his heart. But it wasn’t enough - it was never enough.

When the heat of panic comes over him the need to pray is like a twitching in a muscle, insistent and not to be ignored. He steals away to be alone if he can, and drops to his knees to pray until he feels the creep of calm frost his insides again.

*

**Seven**

If it wasn’t for the shame Aramis would swear that he too had died. He feels numb right through, as if the chill of that snowy night in the forest had seeped in somewhere real and vital inside him, and he would never be warm again. 

Except for the shame. It came at first as mouthful after mouthful of scalding vomit, but that was only there, and then. Now he sits propped in a bed, blankets piled high against the constant buzz of chill in his bones, and spends the hours thinking of the shame congealed inside him, imagines it black and sticky and sludging through his veins with every obscene pump of his still beating heart.

But the blood, the blood, the blood - there’s none left in him, in anyone any more. It was all shed in that clearing, on that night, pints and gallons of it until the snow was red and curdled. There’s nothing left to give.

*

**Six**

He is too weak to sit a horse, and only Porthos is strong enough to heft his almost dead weight up into the saddle, so it’s he that sits behind Aramis and grips him tight. He fears for a moment that the shame will seep out with the chill of his body this close, and Porthos will know, will _know_ , but the other man is warm and solid behind him. 

Porthos wraps his cloak tight around Aramis and holds him with a ferocity that he can feel like a jarring in his bones - so it can not have be so obvious, after all, for if Porthos truly knew how Aramis had been dragged by Marsac and sat, with the blood coursing through the fingers clasped to his head, while the muffled sounds of their friends dying whispered out through the trees….if he knew, he would not bear to touch him.

They ride out as Treville arrives with the rest of the troop, the Captain’s eyes raking at him as he passes by, slumped in Porthos’ arms. Athos exchanges a few hushed words with Treville, quick and urgent, and then they leave him in the clearing to make arrangements to bring the bodies back the long road to Paris. 

The gait of the horse, Porthos’ warmth, the nauseating buzz of fever and the dizzying swirl of snow all combine to lull Aramis into a fitful kind of half-doze. 

He does not wake as such, for he'd never really slept to begin with, but when next he has the clarity to notice things around him he is sitting propped against a barrel in an old barn. A small fire crackles in a long-abandoned hearth, Porthos tending the flames with a few ends of slightly damp wood. 

Athos kneels into the line of Aramis' sight and presses a bottle into his still numb hands, and Aramis' manners try to answer for him with a whispered "Thankyou", his voice paper-thin and dusty from lack of use. It is the first word he's uttered in God knows how long, and it’s rewarded with a pleased quirk of Athos' lips that Aramis doesn’t quite feel he deserves.

“It’s the loss of blood, and the shock,” he hears Athos say, somewhere far away, “He’s been out in the cold. He’ll come back.” 

But Aramis can not believe him, because while he never knew him in his life before the Musketeers, it’s plain as day that Athos never quite came back from whatever yawning chasm of grief had opened up in his own life, many years ago. Athos mourns with every breath and drinks to drown himself, and Aramis doesn’t want to be like him.

The rest of that night is patchy, holed and burnt through with the fever that sets upon him with a ferocity only heightened by the despair, like a great black wave that has been sitting out in the ocean, moving nearer day by day, ready to swallow him entirely.

He will remember hands: cleaning his wound, wrapping the bandage about his head, propping and prodding and clutching him. In his delirium they feel burning hot and hard as bone, the dead hands of dead Musketeers, clawing at him in their vengeance. His body quakes, the sobs wracking through him like dragging knives.

Porthos will tell him later that he had begged for a priest, for confession, for last rites. All that night and well into the next morning he asks over and over, sobbing and pleading and cursing till Porthos has to fist his hands over his ears to block out the sound. 

*

**Five**

Aramis uses powder and shot from twenty-two muskets to shoot the crows away when they begin to grow bold. The men are dead and the birds will have more use of their bodies, but Aramis thinks that they might come for him if they get the taste of flesh. _Wait a bit longer,_ he thinks, _you can have my eyes when I’m dead._

And then he sits, and waits, like the crows: for death, for God, for orders - he’s not sure which, but any would be a comfort, and followed with the same willingness.

It is orders that come first in the end, on the seventh or eighth day. “Look at me, Aramis,” Porthos says, and he does. “We’ll get you out of here,” Athos says, and Aramis let’s them.

*

** Four  **

He can bear it no longer, and though the thought of touching his dead comrades is enough to make him vomit what little rations he’s been able to manage and his belly spikes and cramps with pain, he cannot rid himself of the thought that perhaps he _is_ one of those lumps of clothing and blood and frozen flesh. Perhaps he might wipe aside the dusting of snow and see his own vacant eyes staring back at him, or Marsac’s. 

He goes from body to body, one, nine, fifteen, nineteen, counting them out loud but unable to remember their names any more. Comrades and brothers, just bodies in the end, but none of them his, or Marsac’s. 

At some point he begins to wonder if Athos and Porthos are amongst them too, even knowing as he does that they were not part of the mission. The jittery feeling is so overwhelming that Aramis has to start again and look, really _look_ to be sure that Athos and Porthos are not there. With a curious sense of detachment, he begins to feel his mind stretch and slip away, the rational on the other side of an ever-widening chasm. 

It isn’t fear for Athos and Porthos that he feels though, and there is no relief when he does not find them amongst the dead: the snow is inside him now after all, packed tight and blessedly cold, numbing it all away to nothing.

The blue Musketeers cloaks are crisp and heavy with ice and frozen blood, but he manages to drag them up to cover the faces, and the itching of his skin lessens, just a little.

*

**Three**

He’s alone. With a jerk of surprise, the knowledge breaks itself on him like waves against the a rocky shore. Marsac is not coming back, Marsac left his pauldron and his cloak and his sword, and he’s not coming back and Aramis is alone.

The slow dawning of surprise comes with the watery light of the second morning, because Aramis is still alive, despite making no effort to get up or find shelter or carry on, in any way. He wonders idly if he is giving God a chance to finish what he’d begun in the clearing, to blot out all the lives that had made camp there the evening before, all the voices that had rung bold through the trees. 

Towards the end of the day he begins to move - small and jerky and animal at first, his muscles and limbs shut down and cold as if they don’t belong to him at all. With fumbling fingers he’s fixed a canvas between two trees and dragged the remaining supplies through the snow before he is even aware of what he is doing. And then he sits again, and drifts again.

On the third day, or perhaps the fourth, the shame prickling on his skin is so insistent he begins to scratch livid red marks against his arms. It helps a little. When he is thirsty he looks for snow that is not red with blood, and shovels desperate handfuls into his mouth, the cold slip of it freezing him from the inside out. He has to become like the snow: cold and unfeeling and frozen, or he’ll shatter.

He sits and thinks, very carefully, about the snowflakes, drifting down into his warm palm on that night - except this time they won’t melt, because this time he is cold, and made of ice.

*

** Two **

The fear comes like a rising tide. Marsac has been gone hours. The time blurs, the snow falls and Aramis is alone. His head is pounding, though he can’t remember quite why. When he tries to touch his temple it comes away crusted and sticky with old blood. 

Aramis pulls in his limbs, makes himself as small as possible against the forest and the dead and the fear. He cries like a child, fat salty shuddering tears that rock him bodily. It’s the only warmth he can summon but it fades soon.

The fear is deep and real and unlike anything he’s felt since his childhood: fear of the dark, fear of the dead men around him, no matter that just hours ago they had been his trusted brothers. Now they are nothing but dead and vengeful, because he has survived and they have not.

But the day darkens to night, and the dead men lie still, and Aramis too lies still, crying until he is empty and wrung-out and blurred around the edges. He quietens his breath and his blood and his thoughts, quietens them away to nothing.

*

** One **

The lack of noise is unnerving at first, because it is so sudden, because it is done with such ease: a compacting of snow here, the whisper of blade there, an intake of breath and the sluice and gutter of blood. 

An arrow’s whistling flight and the thud of impact is what begins it, but Aramis doesn’t hear the gasp of Bouchet’s breath or the sound of Danel crumpling to the ground. He and Marsac are across the clearing from the other two on watch tonight, eighteen sleeping men between them.

Before Aramis has turned, half a dozen of those men are already twitching at their gaping throats, and there’s nothing to be done for them at least.

Another three go down with their blades half drawn, five more stand and fight but their masked attackers smother them, melting out of the tree-line like phantoms born of darkness and there are so, so many of them. They make no sound, exchanging no word with each other and moving like shadows across the clearing, the ground painted a liquid black in their wake.

Marsac is a whirl at his back, twisting and turning and pushing with desperation at the four men pressing him backwards.

It’s too quiet, it’s too awful, and the need to fill the space with noise and _fight_ is torn like something solid from Aramis’ throat with a cry that’s animal and desperate and doesn’t sound like him. The fight is shamefully short as it would always have been against such numbers: a fruitless thrust and parry, a wild slash at the back of one of the shadows and a pained grunt the only reply before the whisper of steel releases a bright itch of heat at Aramis’ temple.

A rush of panic and dark shapes is the horses cut loose and scattering into the night, but the blade that catches Aramis’ head has muffled everything away as though he were underwater, and a heartbeat is all that he can hear as hands grip him and drag him into the darkness.

*

** Zero **

The sun is beginning to set, and Aramis sighs happily, stretching out legs cramped from hours of riding and thanking God that the order had finally been given to make camp for the evening. The clearing is wide and level, room enough for all twenty-two of them and the soft piney ground a better bed than they’ve had for some nights.

“Danel,” Aramis calls, a note of teasing in his voice, “Are our orders to sleep tonight, fearless leader?”

Marsac snorts as he unbuckles his horse’s saddle, and Danel glowers at them both. “The others may, but you’re on first watch. Both of you.”

“Remind me who put him in charge again?” Aramis remarks from the corner of his mouth, though he can muster little annoyance. The air is already softening with the crackle of the cook-fires and the tangy blood metal smell of the game they’d brought down earlier being gutted and prepared, and Aramis’ stomach twists in pleased anticipation.

“Treville,” Marsac snorts, “In his wisdom.”

“Danel will be strutting like a peacock for weeks.”

“You’re only angry it wasn’t you he chose to order around all this lovely fresh meat,” Marsac grins, heaving his saddle carelessly into the arms of one of the new Musketeers, whose pauldron shines tight and stiff in the dusky light. “What’s your name again?”

“Bouchet,” Aramis says, clapping his hand to the younger Musketeer’s shoulder. “Which I know because I, unlike you and Danel both, have bothered to learn it.”

Marsac laughs, and it’s incongruous and bright, makes others turn and stare. “I’ll remember their names when they do something memorable.”

“Give us half a chance,” Bouchet pipes up, a breath sucked in to puff up his chest. He must be all of nineteen, Aramis thinks.

“Exactly,” Aramis says, smiling. “That’s what this exercise is for. So leave the children alone, won’t you Marsac?”

They cross to the cook-fires and jostle and cajole for the first of the cooked meat, tender and steaming into the ever-cooling air of night. As the most senior amongst the men they're given the best meat, the warmest spot by the fires, the deference of those around them.

“Snow’s coming,” Aramis says, sniffing at the air.

The first few flakes begin to drift as soon as the words are out, and he smiles triumphantly at the other man, holding out his hand to catch the flecks of white and watch them quiver and melt in his warm palm. 

Marsac shivers and swears profusely. “What is this godforsaken place, anyway?"

Aramis smiles, the chill of the snowy air enough to make a shiver ring itself along his spine.

"This, my friend, is Savoy."

*

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not entirely sure the format of this fic works, but it's a little bit of an experiment. This was the very first Musketeers fic that I began writing, months ago, and it's gone through various guises before I got stuck on the idea of writing it backwards, and to end it with the word Savoy (the first and only time it's spoken), and to try to underline the inevitability of the massacre of Savoy in Aramis' head. He may replay it over and over again in this way, working backwards, but it always ends (and begins) the same way.
> 
> I have no idea why I decided to do this, I think I just wanted to see if I could. With a bit or re-structuring it seemed to work best this way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it _works_. I hope it makes some kind of sense, at least.
> 
> For reference, in my head and therefore in this fic: the first wave of commissioned Musketeers was comprised of Aramis and Marsac, Danel and a handful of other men not mentioned - they were there from the creation of the regiment. The second lot were taken on the training exercise to Savoy soon after receiving their commissions (with a few of the older hands to supervise). They're not all young like Bouchet but they're pretty green. Athos, Porthos and a number of others missed that intake (Athos and Porthose being "assigned" to Aramis as recruits), and once the second wave were largely wiped out they were hurried in to fill the depleted ranks.


End file.
